Citizen Conn

I first met Mr. Morton Feather in the spring of 1997, just after his discharge from a weeklong stay at Cedars-Sinai, where they were treating him for cancer of the bones. Though he was at the time unknown to me even by reputation, I soon learned that my own husband had been among the millions of American boys in the nineteen-sixties whose minds were blown by Feather’s art work in comic books such as The New Frontiersmen and Mister Arcane. When, after dinner that night, I told him that I had met Mort Feather and that the old man was dying, David was so moved that he had to put aside the dish he was drying and sit down. David is a professor of plant pathology, a deliberate, reserved man, given neither to hyperbole nor to self-revelation. And yet that night, sitting in our kitchen, smoothing the dish towel flat on his thigh, my husband made the astonishing admission that he viewed his life as a perpetual struggle to retain some starry residue of the sense of wonder with which the drawings of Mort Feather had imbued his early adolescence. But I’m getting ahead of my story.

When Mr. Camac, the executive director, stopped by my office that morning and suggested that I might want to look in on Mr. Feather now that he was home, the name meant almost nothing to me. I knew only that Morton Feather was one of two residents who had been in the hospital upon my arrival, two days earlier, to assume the rabbi position at Zion Pointe, an assisted-living facility nowhere near any point, spit, or, for that matter, pinnacle that I could see, on the Los Angeles side of the Santa Monica airport. The other hospitalized resident, Yetta Lichtenbaum, I had met for the first time just the day before, if it isn’t in poor taste so to put it, when I officiated—with nothing to go on but the steadfast clue of the Kaddish—at her funeral in Zion Pointe’s bare sanctuary.

After Mr. Camac left, I checked the resident directory and found that Morton Feather was listed in Suite 105. That was around the corner and down the hall from my office, in the Sam and Leah Bratnick Wing. Nothing about the Zion Pointe Residence for Independent Seniors quite lived up to the pomposity of its name, in particular not the dim, low-ceilinged Bratnick Wing, originally built in the nineteen-twenties as the novitiate of a now defunct order of Catholic monks. Its walls had been painted often enough since then, in the abject pastels fashionable among nursing homes, but sometimes in the late afternoon on one wall of my office I could still see, emulsified by years of Los Angeles sunlight, the shadow of a crucifix imprinted in the dust.

I tried calling Mr. Feather’s apartment. There was no answer. But an unanswered telephone, in a place like Zion Pointe, does not always mean that there is nobody home. Mr. Feather might have been deaf, or he might have been drowsing, or it might have been that simply getting up to answer the phone was more than he could manage right then. It might also have been, I knew, more than he thought he could afford. I had worked in such places long enough to learn that a kind of bunker mentality sometimes came over the residents when they were ill or trying to recuperate.

I decided that I had better just drop in on Mr. Feather. I took off the gaudy Bukhara kipa I generally wore and put on a plain black velour one that matched my long black skirt. I tried to think about what I was going to say to this elderly stranger with bone metastasis. There are gifted rabbis for whom the limited vocabulary of condolence is not a handicap but a series of proven vessels into which true emotion can be poured. Not me; usually, though I tried to plan out something gentle and reflective, I ended up relying on my native chattiness to muddle through.

Turning into Mr. Feather’s hall, I saw, far down at the other end of an expanse of gray-brown terrazzo, which the passage of decades of monastic sandals had polished to a liquid shimmer, a white-haired man, on his knees, at the door of what could only be Suite 105. From a distance, I could see that he was tall, even when kneeling; a lean, lanky old guy. My first brief impression—that he was repairing or tampering with the lock on the door—was quickly replaced by one of unmistakable supplication. He clutched the doorknob with both hands and seemed almost to hang from it, his head bowed, moving his lips as though the keyhole were the meatus of an ear. He was speaking urgently and reasonably, with an exasperated rasp.

“I drove three hours,” he was saying. “You can give me five goddam minutes.”

When he heard me coming, he looked up, his face blank, dot-eyed. He reached into the breast pocket of his blazer, navy with brass buttons, took out a yellow envelope, and slipped it under the door of 105. Then, in segments, like a carpenter’s rule, he unfolded himself to his full height. Under the blazer he wore a gray turtleneck. His hair was swept back in luxuriant furrows from the crown of his high forehead, and he wore his wide sideburns with panache. The rather dated, Dave Brubeck nattiness of his attire was spoiled only by the grin of his half-zipped trouser fly.

“Mr. Feather?” I said. The former blackness of the man’s hair lingered oddly in his eyebrows, drawn across his pale forehead as if by a thick-nibbed pen. His dark eyes were deeply shadowed and rimmed with pink, and I would have said—just guessing—that something was eating at him; yet I knew, as soon as the words were spoken, that he could not be Mort Feather.

Now he just looked hurt, as though the name Feather were a reproach to him. He shook his head, then inclined it toward the mute steel door of 105.

“In there,” he said.

He turned and walked away, the soles of his blue boat shoes squeaking against the old brown monastery floor, and disappeared around the corner without a backward glance.

I rapped with the knocker. There was no reply. I drummed with my fingers.

“Mr. Feather?” I called.

While I waited, I noticed that the mezuzah on the lintel had come loose. It was the standard-issue Zion Pointe model, verdigris with a stylized Hebrew shalom in raised brass, half painted over by a careless brush. I tried to insert the edge of my pinky finger into the lower of the two screws but succeeded only in tearing the nail.

“Mr. Feather!” I was suddenly irritated. “Mr. Feather, can you hear me? It’s Rabbi Teplitz. I came to see how you were feeling.” I pounded on the door with the heel of my hand. “Mr. Feather!” Then I had a thought. “He’s gone, Mr. Feather,” I said.

The door opened almost at once, and I found myself looking not at the downy-haired wisp I had been imagining, a human plume that would be lofted into Heaven by the next puff of merciful breath from the mouth of the Most High, but a thick, squat, square-jawed teamster, crewcut and clean-shaven, smoking a fat cigar. His nose had been broken at some point, smashed flat against his face, and in his forehead, above his left eye, there were a series of deep old scars like a line of cuneiform. His shirtsleeves were rolled back to reveal a pair of wasted but sinewy brown forearms. His hair was the color of ash on an iron poker. His eyes were hidden behind murky lenses in heavy black frames.

“I’m terribly sorry, Rabbi,” he said. “I meant no disrespect.”

I looked down at the threshold, but the yellow envelope was not there.

“Who was that man?” I said.

He pursed his lips, as though the question had not occurred to him, and shrugged. “His name is Artie Conn,” he said. He moved his body to one side and gestured into the apartment. “Please come in.”

I had already learned to expect very little from the rooms of old people. There were some, most of them women, who transported into the last two hundred square feet of their lives, if not the entire composition, at least a kind of abstract of their abandoned houses and histories, a terse, semi-random, incongruous summary composed of a Persian rug, a tinted studio portrait of a romantic young sailor, a Swarovski bud vase, a parakeet named half-madly for a dead husband, an accordion file jammed with forty years of recipes religiously clipped from the Times. Most people arrived, however, after the inevitable final yard sale, with only a few valises, some liquor boxes filled with rattling pictures in frames, perhaps a favorite recliner. Mort Feather slept in a tiny single bed. He kept two feet of battered, manly classics—“The Call of the Wild,” “Moby-Dick,” Kipling and Service, “Kon-Tiki,” “A Farewell to Arms,” “Microbe Hunters”—on a veneer shelf, and his dark knit shirts and tan trousers hung indistinguishably from a dozen hangers, with a single dun-colored suit, on a chrome rack in one corner. The rest of his room was occupied only by canvases and paint, by the burnt-upholstery stink of his perfecto, and by the Los Angeles sunshine that drizzled in through the raised Venetian blinds and smeared itself across every surface like Vaseline. The floor itself was draped with spattered tarpaulins. Paintings hung on the walls or leaned, stacked ten deep, against them. They seemed to be sombre paintings, green-gray and blue-gray and ochre, stung here and there with red. At the time, they struck me as purely abstract, but on subsequent visits to Mr. Feather’s room I learned to pick out a hydrant, a light-filled evening window, the spidery filigree of a fire escape. He was painting the landscape of his Brooklyn childhood.

“You’re an artist,” I said.

He shrugged. “More or less.”

There was nowhere to sit but at the table in the breakfast nook, avocado Formica with legs and matching chairs made of white-painted curlicue iron. The kitchen was spotless, even sterile, not a plate, not a crumb of toast, no dry bit of orange pulp stuck to the side of a glass. Old men are frequently excellent housekeepers, but Mr. Feather’s kitchen looked actually unused. There were no dishtowels, no keep and battlement of pill bottles; the toaster sat unplugged, its cord neatly tied into a bundle. All this unnerved me until I remembered that Mr. Feather had just got out of the hospital. Perhaps he hadn’t had time to dirty a dish.

“So, how are you feeling?” I said.

He shrugged again. Aged Jews tend to shrug with practiced eloquence, expressing subtle fluctuations in the nature of their doubt. Mr. Feather’s shrug was inarticulate and curt as a child’s. The question seemed simply not to interest him. I had sat down at the kitchen table thinking he would join me, but he continued to stand, arms folded across his stout chest, regarding me.

“The new rabbi,” he said. “Rabbi Teplitz.”

“Rebecca,” I said.

I waited to see what he would say next. Some of the male residents of Zion Pointe had chosen to make jokes on our first being introduced. These men were inveterate, miscellaneous jokers, not overly concerned with matters of religion, orthodoxy, or the state of their souls. Others had offered, with a dash that I found touching, remarks, typical of their generation, that toed an artful line between salacity and gallantry. And then there were those who had felt moved, either on the spot or—after taking some time to reflect and make notes—in my office, to deliver themselves of wild, unanswerable orations, complete with hand gestures and table-poundings, on all the things I could not possibly know about life, the Torah, and the State of Israel, and on my evident personal shortcomings relative to the previous (old, male) rabbi, or, in one case, on the secret, malign accords between Hitler and Cordell Hull, F.D.R.’s Secretary of State during the Second World War.

“Can I make you some tea, Rabbi?” Mr. Feather said.

Naturally, I wanted to reply that he ought not to bother, that he should just sit down and rest and let me put the kettle on for him. But over the years I had seen enough of the assiduous cruelty of children and grandchildren, in suppressing old people’s vivid hunger for bother, to know better.

“Tea would be nice,” I said. I looked around the kitchen for some hint, some way into his history and life. In vain I searched the mugs, hanging on hooks from the bottom of a cabinet, for the names of favorite vacation spots, for bits of corny wisdom, for testimonials or messages from co-workers or grandchildren. The pot holder on its hook was plain green terry. It had not been woven out of colored elastic bands on a plastic loom at a summer camp. The lone refrigerator magnet read, in cheery blue script, with impenetrable circularity, “Zion Pointe.” It was not currently in use; there were no to-do lists, no prescriptions, not a single scrap of paper or photograph. The wall clock was as anonymous as a bus station’s.

“Do you have any children, Mr. Feather?” I tried. “A wife?”

“I was never married.” He took the kettle from the stove. It rattled with the mysterious beads that can materialize over time from a stream of clear water. “I have no family to speak of within a thousand miles of here. I have no friends.” He set the kettle back on the burner and turned on the flame. He made a dark, scraping sound that alarmed me for a moment until I realized that he was laughing. “But at least I have my health.” He took a box of Red Rose tea from a cabinet. There was only one tea bag left. He dangled it between us like a hypnotist’s watch.

“We’ll have to share,” he said.

I said that would be fine. When he opened the cabinet under the sink, to throw away the empty box, I saw, poking from the mouth of the garbage can, the yellow envelope that the tall man had slipped under the door. Mr. Feather jabbed at it with a finger, then turned and glanced at me over his shoulder, looking . . . not guilty, exactly. Apprehended; caught in the act.

“What is it?” I said. I had long since trained myself not to worry about the question of whether something was any of my business. “What’s in the envelope, Mr. F.?”

He let out a long sigh, and fished the yellow envelope back out of the trash. He stood up, weighing it, tapping its sharp corners with the pads of his fingers. Then he handed it over.

“You tell me,” he said. He opened a drawer, rifled through it, and came out with a small paring knife. While I slit the envelope at the flap, he took off his glasses and wiped them on the hem of his paint-spattered polo shirt, affecting unconcern.

“It’s a check,” I said. “Oh, my goodness.”

“How much?” he said. “How much did I throw away?”

“Oh, my gosh.”

“How much?”

“A hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

He nodded and put his glasses back on.

“Mr. Feather, I . . . I know you’ve been in the hospital. . . . Is it possible—”

“That what? That the painkillers are clouding my thoughts?”

He was teasing me. I lowered my voice and tried to reassume a measure of the clerical authority that had dissipated in my rather teen-aged amazement at the sum. “Mr. Feather,” I said. “You cannot throw this check away.”

“I don’t need it. I don’t want it. I won’t accept it.” The kettle began to whistle. He let it go. “I’m not going to take one dime from Artie Conn.”

I looked at the check again and saw that it had been drawn from the account of Nova Publications, Inc., at 323 Third Avenue, New York.

“It’s not from Artie Conn,” I said. “It’s from these people.” I held the check out to him, pointing to the account holder’s name. “Nova Publications.”

“It’s from him,” he said. “He put them up to it.”

Then he held out his hand, palm upward. I looked at him, knowing what he intended to do. The kettle went on squandering its contents in an endless shrill alarum, as if registering its protest over what was about to happen. I shook my head. He nodded. I laid the check on his upturned palm.

“Thank you,” he said.

He tore the check in half, then crumpled the halves together and tossed the little blue ball into the trash. He shut off the flame under the kettle, and the screeching of the valve sputtered and died.

“You look sicker than me,” he said. He had, I had gathered, a dour, gravelly sense of humor. “Please, tearing it up gives me so much more naches than spending it ever could. What could I buy? What good would it do?”

“That isn’t how I feel,” he said. “Those are just ancillary arguments. How I feel is, if this cigar here hadn’t gone out, and I hadn’t left my matches in the other room, I would have lit that check on fire, just to show you how I feel.”

I pointed to the stove. “The burners,” I said, trying to get into the spirit.

“Yeah, well, I think the moment has passed,” he said. “But you get the idea. Lemon or milk?”

“Lemon.”

“I don’t have lemon. And I think my milk maybe turned while I was gone.”

I said I would take my tea plain.

That night, in our own message-rich, sauce-spattered kitchen, David told me what he knew of the story of Feather and Conn. They had worked together for some twenty-five years, from after the war until the end of the sixties, in obscurity and in fame, affixing their names, in that time, to both phantasmagoria and crap. For thirteen years they had toiled away at Nova Publications, a strictly-from-hunger house that climbed onto every bandwagon to come rolling through the world of comics—grisly horror, true romance, Western, and crime—until one fateful day in 1959 when Sol Geisler, the owner and publisher, on the verge of closing down the Nova shop for good, received a fateful letter. It had been sent by Geisler’s accountant to one of his chief competitors, Century Comics, but some dizzy secretary had stuck it into an envelope addressed to Nova. The letter informed Century, in warm terms, in case they did not already know it, that business was looking very good. Not long before this, out of sheer desperation, Century had begun to revive a number of the costumed crime-fighter characters that had been so popular before and during the war. Now those books were, to the surprise of Sol Geisler no less than that of the accountant he shared with Century Comics, beginning to sell.

That afternoon, Geisler called his only remaining employees, Feather and Conn, into his office and showed them the misaddressed letter.

“Boys,” he told them, though they were no longer boys at all, “it’s time to dust off the long-underwear types.”

They started with the old Black Diamond, Nova’s biggest star during the war years. Today you can buy a tattered, yellowed copy of the first issue of The New Adventures of the Black Diamond, dated January, 1960, for about twenty thousand dollars. The Elf and a few other revivals followed, then Feather and Conn began to create new characters, drawn from world mythology and the principles of physics and chemistry. The canvas grew broad, encompassing other galaxies and planes of reality; the characters, cranky and pixilated and neurotic in a hip, late-fifties style, approached, for the first time in the history of comic books, three dimensions.

All that was part of the legend of Feather and Conn, a legend crafted, in large part, by Artie Conn, who in the mid-sixties had begun to incorporate himself and Mort Feather into the stories he wrote, interacting with the jiving young New Frontiersmen or the irascible Elf. In the comics Feather and Conn were always depicted as friends on the Abbot and Costello model, quarrelling, trading insults, but ever, at bottom, bosom pals. When, in an issue of The Elf, Conn was thrown into the Daliesque Impossible Zone, Feather risked his life to get his partner out. Their long association was a key part of the legend. Another part—its Ragnarök, I suppose—was the tale of how, at the peak of their success, with Nova Publications an expanding empire bringing in tens of millions of dollars a year, Feather and Conn were asked by Nova’s lawyers to sign away any claim they might ever attempt to make on the characters they had created for Nova, in exchange for a sizable cash payment. The lawyers approached them separately—the fertile partnership of Feather and Conn had never been formalized and would not have been recognized by a court of law. Feather refused; he hired an attorney and instructed him to begin looking into the possibility of renegotiating the Feather-and-Conn contract to include payment of royalties on comics featuring their characters. Conn, however, who was feeling the bite of alimony and bad investments, agreed to sign the Nova release.

When Feather heard that his partner had sold them out, he called his lawyer. “Never mind,” he told him. “I’ll sign the damn paper.”

From that moment on, David told me, Feather’s work began to fade and cheapen. His attention wandered—the flame had gone out. The final gruesome scene of the Feather-and-Conn saga was the day that Artie Conn went to tell Mort Feather that Nova was not going to renew his contract for 1969—was going, in other words, to fire him.

“It was the saddest day of my life, when I heard,” David said, trying to sound self-mocking but unable to conceal the nerdly pain of it. “Way sadder than when the Beatles broke up. And now I can’t believe that one day soon you’re going to come home from work and tell me that Mort Feather is dead.”

“He’s getting treatment,” I said. “But I don’t get the impression that they’re holding out an awful lot of hope.”

“Just do me a favor, then,” David said. “Keep an eye on him for me.”

So, for the next few weeks, I tried to keep an eye on Mr. Feather. I saw that although he was unfailingly cheerful, polite, and even solicitous toward the other residents, he did not seem to hang around with them very much. I never saw him playing cards, chess, or Scrabble. He wasn’t part of the lobby crowd, or of the bored and ravenous gang that filled the chairs outside the dining room at four o’clock every afternoon and sat around complaining about the food until five, when dinner was served. He was, without question, the most talented artist at Zion Pointe, but he never seemed to go to the art room or to avail himself of any of the equipment or supplies; he always bought his own, and when Zion Pointe held its annual art show there was not a single Mort Feather for sale.

Mr. Feather attended services only once—he was not, he had informed me, “the type.” It was on the Saturday morning that followed my visit to his kitchen. He showed up in his lone, brown suit, shiny at the elbows, with a wide brown 1974 necktie. During the Torah reading, he came up to the bimah, as I had invited him to do, and handled his aliyah with toneless and desultory ease, his Ashkenazic pronunciation of the Hebrew words rich and pungent, packed in oil. When he finished his pair of blessings, I offered him the traditional congratulations, and as we shook hands I saw what I took to be a hint of gratitude in his eyes, as though, to his surprise, he were taking genuine comfort in hearing the Saturday-morning prayers again after the passage of twenty or thirty years. But he never came back to my little shul behind the gift shop, with its windows of Lucite stained glass and the ever-spreading empire of names on its memorial wall. Thereafter I seemed to see him only at mealtimes—he’d sit with the younger men, the ones who went in for lawn bowling, poker, and dabbling in the stock market, letting them do most of the talking. And every so often I’d see him in the media center. He was a big Burt Lancaster fan; when “The Killers” turned up on one of the classic-movie channels, I think he must have caught every single showing of it.

One Saturday, David came to the morning service—my husband, it had turned out, much to our mutual regret, was not “the type,” either—and afterward I arranged for him to meet the idol of his youth. The three of us went down to the dining room, and while the men started chatting I fetched us each a cup of coffee and a slice of coffee cake. The coffee was not good at Zion Pointe, but I had quite a little thing for the coffee cake. It was crumbly and moist, sandy on top, and, as coffee cake ought to be, distinctly salty. I ate two pieces of it while they sat discussing the imaginary adventures of invented heroes who wore tights and armor and fought megalomaniacal psychopaths with names that sounded like skin conditions.

“When Fenris ate the sun,” David said (or something like that, don’t ask me), “Christ.” He shook his head, lost in admiration for the stunning vistas and cataclysms that had once flowed from Mort Feather’s pen.

“Yes, Fenris was lots of fun,” Mr. Feather said grimly. “But wolves are tricky. In real life they don’t look the way they do in people’s minds. They’re actually sort of sweet-faced animals. You draw an accurate wolf, people tend to think it’s a dog.”

“Interesting,” David said.

“I took Fenris from the Norse myths,” Mr. Feather said. “I used to have a book.”

He sipped at his cup of coffee, wincing a little. He didn’t seem to be enjoying the homage David had come to pay him. When I’d first mentioned to him that my husband was a fan, a funny look had crossed his face, at once irritated and pitying, as if, for my sake, he would be willing to take my arrested adolescent of a husband off my hands for an hour or two. Now, as David plied him with intricate and silly questions and heartfelt flattery, Mr. Feather seemed to shift and fidget in his chair. He was a man of gravitas, inert and contemplative, and not the type to squirm or tap his feet in impatience. Nevertheless, I could see that David’s enthusiasm for his four-color masterworks of thirty-five years ago was making him uncomfortable. Finally, David noticed it, too.

“I’m sorry,” he said, laying down the fork that he had been happily waving around. “I guess you must be pretty tired of talking about all this stuff.”

“Not at all,” Mr. Feather said. “If the circumstances were different, I’m sure I’d be able to look back on my career in comic books with a good deal of pride and affection. But, unfortunately, for various reasons, which, I hope you’ll forgive me, I prefer not to discuss, I can’t think about that time or my work then with anything but a bitter taste in my mouth. A taste of ashes. It’s all ruined for me. That’s the sorry truth.”

It was hard to know just what to say after this speech, but Mr. Feather solved the problem for us by pushing his tray away from him, the cake uneaten, the coffee half drunk, and standing up. He signed the paperback copy of something called “The Black Grimoire: A Mr. Arcane Treasury” that David had bought that morning at Hi-De-Ho Comics, shook his hand, and then walked, with his rolling, scrapper’s gait, out of the dining room.

Mr. Feather had not been gone for more than a minute or two when Artie Conn wandered in, holding a rolled-up magazine in one hand and squinting a little as he scanned the tables. When he saw me, he blushed and looked as if he might be on the point of backing out. I would have been willing to let him go; whatever his quarrel with his old partner was, until Mr. Feather asked me for help it was not really any business of mine. But I had noticed that there tended, even among the least observant Jews, to be something about my presence, as a rabbi, that struck people as ineluctable. Men with no faith, women with nothing in their hearts but guilt, rage, or the accumulated inky soot of years of fierce denial, had crossed crowded ballrooms and airports to give me the opportunity to condemn them or force them to confess. This was never my intention, of course, but often enough, for better or worse, it was my accomplishment.

“That’s him,” I said, in a low voice, as Mr. Conn ran his fingers through his longish hair, then started toward our table.

“I know,” David said. “Wow.”

“Hiya,” Mr. Conn said, with a smile that was pleasant if somewhat formally so—the execution was flawless, but the intent was just not there. He looked as if he hadn’t slept; silver whiskers spangled his cheeks. “You’re the new rabbi, aren’t you? Last time I was here, they told me—”

“I’m Rabbi Teplitz. This is my husband, David.”

“It’s a real honor, Mr. Conn.”

“You know who I am?” He looked childishly pleased; then, again like a child, he pouted. “You’ve been talking to Feather.” He smacked the palm of his left hand with the rolled-up magazine. “Look, I don’t know what he might have told you, Rabbi, but until you hear my side of the story”—he showed me his great gray capped teeth—“you can’t send me to Hell just yet.”

“He hasn’t said a word about you,” I said. I was always a little uneasy when people started talking about going to Hell, a concept from which we Jews have been trying to distance ourselves since the day we invented it. “David here is one of your biggest fans.”

“A fan, eh?” This time the smile came off brilliantly. He pumped David’s hand up and down. “Well, if you know a little about me, then you’ll probably appreciate this.” He unrolled the magazine and thrust it toward us with both hands. It was called The Comics Journal; it was nothing I had ever seen before. On the cover there was a large, unfriendly, accurate caricature of the very man to whom we were speaking—the big teeth, the Arthur Fiedler locks, the good-natured hipster leer—and the words, in big, excited blue capitals, “CITIZEN CONN,” and, beneath this, in smaller letters, “THE COMPLETE GARY GROTH INTERVIEW,” and, still smaller, at the bottom, “JIVING WITH ARTIE ABOUT LIFE, THE NEGAVERSE, AND THE STRAIGHT DOPE ON MORT FEATHER.”

“That’s great,” I said, not understanding, and feeling, to be frank, a certain reluctance, inspired by the whole idea of an apparently serious journal devoted to comic books, to understand. “You’re on the cover.”

“That isn’t the important part, sweetheart.”

He peeled back the magazine to a page where several paragraphs, set in small type, had been highlighted in fluorescent green, then he handed it to David, having apparently given up on me. I leaned in to read over David’s shoulder.

The highlighted paragraphs made up the bulk of Mr. Conn’s reply to questions from the interviewer about the role that Mort Feather had played in the creation or reformulation of the New Frontiersmen, Mr. Arcane, the Black Diamond, the Elf, and the other “classic” characters on which Nova Publications’ success had been founded. For years now, apparently, comic books published by Nova that starred these and other costumed heroes made famous by Feather and Conn always featured a banner on the first page saying that they were “Artie Conn Productions.” Although Artie Conn was still strongly associated with Nova, a company to which he had devoted nearly fifty years of his life and of which he was the living symbol, and although Feather had long since severed his ties with the firm, a number of people—my husband among them—felt that the absence of Feather’s name from the books he had helped pioneer almost forty years earlier was certainly inaccurate, arguably dishonest, probably an attempt to keep Feather away from the profits, and perhaps a reflection of Artie Conn’s intention to aggrandize his own role in the story of Nova’s success. Conn was viewed as hogging the glory, stealing the credit, or, according to the charitable construction my husband put on the situation, as a fairly talented but deeply insecure man envious of the indisputable genius of his erstwhile friend. The interviewer wanted to know, once and for all: just how much of the early Nova stuff was Mort Feather responsible for?

A: Well, that’s a question I get a lot, as you know. And over the years maybe, maybe I haven’t been quite as—as forthcoming as I might have been about the part Morty played in all that. There are various reasons I could go into, and God knows the amateur psychologists and armchair inquisitors have been pretty much hanging me in effigy for years over this. But now I would like to take this opportunity to set the record straight. The Frontiersmen, the Elf, all those great characters and ideas were as much Morty’s doing as my own. We were partners. We had a great working relationship. And I think that’s what I’ve always said.

Q: So, given that, is there any chance of getting the tagline in the books changed to read “A Feather and Conn Production”?

A: Gary, to tell you the truth, I’m working on that very thing. But of course it isn’t up to me. I’m only the editor emeritus.

“I just want him to see this,” Mr. Conn said. “But the bastard won’t even take my calls. Pardon me, Rabbi. He won’t see me. I write him letters, they come back. I arranged for him to receive an extremely generous settlement from Nova, a regular annual income from the royalties. Royalties! Nobody in our generation got royalties!” His voice rose in exasperation to a schoolboy alto, then sank to an incredulous whisper: “He never even cashed the check.”

“He tore it up, actually,” I said. “I was there.”

“You let him tear up that check? Did he tell you how much it was for, that check?”

I was obliged to confess that, in fact, he had.

“And you just, forgive me, Rabbi, but you just sat there and let him tear up a check for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”

He turned to David, who was slicing an apple with his Swiss Army knife. It was an elaborate affair, with thirty-three different tools and implements, but, as far as I could tell, David never used it for anything but slicing apples and tightening screws. My husband now nodded, disloyally, I thought, as if he, too, were appalled by my acquiescence in a wanton act of check vandalism. But before I could begin to defend myself Conn was backtracking. He patted me on the arm.

“Don’t worry about it, it’s all right,” he said. “I know how he is. Believe you me.” He gave his head a bitter shake. “Look, Rabbi, I need your help. He needs your help, too. The man is sick, you know that. He’s dying. I talked to his nephew, Jerry. He lives in New York. The doctor gives Mort a month, maybe two. So I really need to make this right with him. It’s been eating at me for years.”

I looked over at David, who was regarding me now with such hope, with such patent belief in my ability to reconcile these old partners and antagonists, that I, who knew my own limitations much better than I had ever allowed my husband to, was ashamed.

“All right, then,” I said. “We might as well go see him now.”

In the two months since my first visit to his apartment, Mort Feather’s mezuzah had not been tightened, or else it had come loose again. It looked as though a single good slam of the door would be enough to send it tumbling from the jamb.

“Fix that, will you?” I snapped. “It’s really bugging me.”

David went to work with alacrity, always happy for an excuse to employ his marvellous Swiss knife, but in particular when people were getting ready to start hurling emotions around.

“Mr. Feather?” I tapped three times quickly. “Mr. Feather, can you hear me? It’s Rabbi Teplitz. Mr. Feather, I have Mr. Conn here with me.”

There was no reply.

“Mr. Feather, I’ve spoken with Mr. Conn at some length now, and I sincerely believe that his desire to reconcile with you is genuine.” You are remarkably eloquent, I told myself, when confronted only with the cool smooth metal of a door. “Mr. Feather, please.”

Not without gentleness, Artie Conn brushed me aside and then pounded savagely on the door ten times.

“Morty! Morty, God damn you, for Christ’s sake, open up!”

We waited. When nothing happened, Mr. Conn sagged a little, as though one of his knees had given out, and rested his forehead against the wall beside the door.

“Maybe he isn’t there,” I said. “Maybe he’s resting.”

“He’s there. He hears.”

We waited for another minute or so, and then it was clear that we had to give up. I unrolled the magazine again, smoothed it out, and promised that I would deliver it personally to Mr. Feather.

“What more does he want from me?” Mr. Conn said softly. “What more can I do?”

I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder, carefully at first, and then, when he seemed not to notice, with greater weight and tenderness. “Be patient,” I told him. “I’m sure that we can settle this eventually.”

He nodded, slumping against me, almost visibly putting his trust in me. Then David and I walked him down the hall to the lobby and out into the hazy dazzle of the parking lot. It was a brilliant afternoon. A bulbous old propeller liner, like something out of “Casablanca,” droned into the sky overhead. We shook hands, and he started toward his car, something tiny and green, a Triumph or an Alfa Romeo.

“You tell him for me,” he said, forming his hand into an inarticulate fist. “I’m not giving up. I’m going to give him peace before he dies if it kills him.” He grinned and waved, already recovering a measure of what I took to be a habitual jauntiness. Then he worked his big frame into his miniature vehicle. He swerved out of the parking lot, his engine rattling and coughing, and then shot, with a stylish little squeal of tires, onto the boulevard, toward the 405 and San Diego, the place to which he had, by and large, retired from the comic-book business three years before.

We went back to Mr. Feather’s door, and this time, unencumbered by Artie Conn, managed to gain instant admittance. The paintings—closeups of manhole covers with their cryptic labyrinthine pattern of raised welts, loving roseate sunsets that turned out to be the sheen and scuff on a spaldeen—had multiplied; there were so many of them now that the artist had been obliged to carve a trail, as it were, among them, that would permit access to the kitchen table, where David and I now sat down. Mr. Feather cleared a stack of canvases from a third chair that, I imagined, had not held a human behind since he took up residence in Suite 105, and settled himself, looking composed, relaxed, not in the least apprehensive or, to be honest, especially interested in what I had to say. I showed him the magazine, and encouraged David to display his enthusiasm for this long-overdue and considerable gesture that Mr. Conn had made, in a respected journal that was widely read, as David had given me to understand, by the leading opinion-makers in the comics field.

“When somebody finally does the right thing, you have to give him credit for it,” I told him. “Even if it took him thirty years or more to get around to it. People change, Mr. Feather.”

This was something that, in the face of a good deal of evidence to the contrary, I truly did believe, fundamentally, as a matter of faith. “I think that Mr. Conn sincerely wants to make it up to you. I really do. I think that this article and the money are proof of that.”

Mr. Feather listened politely, nodding his head, his big knuckly hands with their expressive fingers spread contentedly on the tops of his knees. He even managed a small but congenial smile.

“Screw the money,” he said pleasantly. “Screw the credit, too.”

I was stunned. I thought of those words from the thirty-second chapter of Exodus, that famous expression of divine exasperation: “I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiff-necked people.” What had Conn done to Feather that the latter found so unforgivable, irredeemable by emolument, by statements of praise and credit, by the persistent efforts of heartfelt remorse? What hurt could so engross a man that he would determine to carry it with him to the grave?

David nudged my foot with his, and then, when that failed, gave my knee a squeeze. I guess no one in the room had said anything for quite some time.

“What is it that you want?” I said finally, not bothering to conceal my irritation with this stiff-necked man. “If it isn’t a matter of money, and the credit isn’t important to you, what is? What is it going to take to get you to forgive Artie Conn?”

Mr. Feather shrugged, another of his unintelligible shrugs. “Nothing,” he said. “What I wanted from him he couldn’t give me. But it was never a matter of getting the credit. And God knows it ain’t the money.”

“What is it?” I said, feeling a little silly at how girlish my voice came out sounding. “Can you tell us?”

He shook his head, looking sorry to have to let me down. “If I tried to put it into words,” he said, haltingly, with a wince that might well have been the product of the excruciating pain that was ringing in his bones, “I’d sound like an idiot. Which I’m not. And neither is he. He knows. He ought to know. Deep in his heart, he knows what he did to me.”

Mr. Conn made one last attempt to earn the forgiveness of Mr. Feather. He showed up in my office at Zion Pointe on a Tuesday, quite early. I had been called into the hospital at five that morning to be there as one of my old women died. The woman’s daughter and son-in-law were coming down from Calabasas to meet with the funeral director in my office. The dead woman—her name was Mae—had been a favorite of mine, but, beyond that, caring for the dead was the most important part of my job. After my meeting with the family and the funeral director, I was going to head over to the funeral home on Pico and sit with Mae’s body for the rest of the day, praying: this was not my duty so much as Mae’s right.

I had just sat down in my office, hoping to get in a few minutes of meditation, maybe even a catnap, before the Weintraubs showed up to start the day’s work of handing Mae on from this world to the next, when Mr. Conn walked in. Actually, when he walked in I was crying. I always allowed myself to feel sad, if I was feeling sad, when somebody went; in that kind of congregation you had to, or you’d harden and snap.

Mr. Conn did not notice, at first, that I was crying. He was very excited when he walked in, agitated, happy, and angry at the same time, in a way that unnerved me. He had on a chocolate-and-vanilla striped seersucker suit with a knit polo shirt, sky blue. There was a stain on the polo shirt, at the belly, that I suspected was refried beans. He’d knocked on my door—for symbolic reasons I tried always to keep my door open—and then, before I could even ask him to wait a minute, he’d poked in his head and said, “Rabbi Teplitz? Have you maybe got a minute?”

“Well . . .”

“Just one minute.” He had eased more than half of himself into my office by then, and though the dispute between Feather and Conn struck me at that moment as a vain and picayune business, I could hardly turn him away. “Actually, more like, say, seven minutes.” He was not a part of my official congregation, but he was a member of my ordained one. “I’ve gone way out on a limb here, Rabbi.”

He brandished a videocassette on whose label the words “VICTORY AT SEA—PART 2” had been scrawled in black Magic Marker and then crossed out. His Tony Bennett sideburns needed a trim; they were beginning to curl at the ends, just a little, into inadvertent payot.

“You’ve gone out on a limb, Mr. Conn?”

“Way out.”

“And it was all captured on videotape?”

“I went on television,” he said. “Maybe you saw me?” He named the host of a talk show that I had heard of but never seen.

I shook my head. “I don’t see a lot of TV.”

“Are you—what’s the matter, sweetheart? Why are you crying?” He leaned over the desk and gave me a few stiff pats on the head. One of his sleeve buttons clinked my earring. “There, there,” he said.

“I’m fine.” I waved him to a chair, blew my nose, fixed my kipa more firmly with its silver hairpin. “Please sit down.”

“Did you eat something?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You have to eat,” he said.

I said I would have something in a little while. “So, you went out on a limb on television.”

He opened his mouth, then seemed to think better of trying to explain. He looked around, at the black steel bookshelves freighted with argument and prayer, at the small table, formerly the property of some young monk, that held my printer and fax machine, at the file cabinet stuffed with mimeographed liturgy, minutes of board meetings, and yards of comfort and inspiration culled from the wise and long-suffering saints of many peoples, alphabetized by tribulation, milestone, and stage of grief. His eyes alighted finally on a defunct slab of Japanese circuitry sitting on top of the file cabinet.

“That a VCR?”

“It’s broken. We’ll have to go down to the media center.”

“Please,” he said. He got up from the chair. “Seven minutes and thirteen seconds, that’s all it’ll take.”

I thought about begging off, telling him that I had important work to do, that Mae Horvitz had died and there were preparations to be made. I was shocked by his egotism, by the selfishness of his single-minded obsession with obtaining Feather’s forgiveness. But then, I reminded myself, there was no reason for this old man to have a clearer idea of the tragedies going on around him than anybody else did.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll watch your tape.”

In the hall, he surprised me by taking my arm, not out of courtliness but because he needed somebody to lean on. He had lost weight; the skin of his jowls was crêpey and trembling. The weight of him on my arm was negligible. He seemed to have endured the final stages of Mort Feather’s illness less well than the patient himself, whose grip remained vigorous, his flesh hale, his appetite for the kitchen’s dubious cooking unimpaired.

“I don’t have any illusions about getting Mort to watch this myself,” he said. “I bet the bastard doesn’t even have a television.”

“No, you’re right, he doesn’t.”

“But after I leave here today I would like for you to show this to him.” He tapped the cassette with a confident finger. “Make sure he sees it. I wonder if you would do that for me, Rabbi? It would mean a lot to me.”

“Of course,” I said.

“There’s no way he’ll be able to keep it up,” Conn said. “Not after he sees this.”

We went into the media center. Two of the residents, Betty Firestone and Sally Gabler, sat deeply absorbed in a program about the death of Sal Mineo. It was only with difficulty, and repeated, half-disbelieved assurances that the gentleman on my right arm was an eminent publisher of children’s magazines, whose recent appearance on a well-known talk show they were now going to be able to enjoy, that I was able to wrest control of the remote from Betty. I put in the tape, and we sat down to watch.

“That is him,” Sally allowed.

“I’ve never heard of this program,” Betty said. “What is this program?”

“Sh-h-h,” I said.

The talk show’s host and Artie Conn chatted amiably for five minutes about the imminent release of the long-overdue Hollywood adaptation of Mister Arcane that was the pretext for the interview, starring Kevin Kline in the title role (perfect casting, my husband thought). Whoever was in charge of making up Artie Conn had done a hasty job of it, and though I told him that he came off very well, I thought that he looked ghastly. There was a large bloody nick on his throat, and a corresponding red blossom on his shirt collar. At last, as if cautiously, the host dared to raise the subject of Conn’s old partner, Mort Feather. His name, it was said, had been included in the credits of the upcoming film—which would read “Based on the character created by Mort Feather and Artie Conn.” It was furthermore said that this gesture came at the personal insistence of Artie Conn himself. Was this true? And what was Mort Feather up to these days? Were they in touch? What was the truth behind those old stories of ill-feeling and resentment? Had they ever attempted a rapprochement?

“Yes!” the televised Mr. Conn told the host, pouncing on the question, hunching forward in his swivel chair as if the host had just played right into his hands. “I have tried to patch things up with Mort. I have seen to it that he be paid for his work at Nova in the sixties, that he receive published credit in every issue of a comic book featuring a character that he and I developed, that people all over the world hear it straight from my lips that I never could have done it without him.” A grin, yellow and nauseating. “But now I see that nothing short of a full confession is ever going to satisfy that man.”

The host of the program raised a renowned luxuriant eyebrow: a confession? That sounded interesting. Not to Betty Firestone and Sally Gabler, who had lost interest and left the room, never to hear the previously unrevealed eyewitness testimony about Sal Mineo’s last hours on earth that they had been promised.

“For thirty-odd years now,” Mr. Conn, on television, went on, “I have allowed the world to believe that the New Frontiersmen, Mister Arcane, and all those other great characters were the product of my own inspiration. But now I would like to set the record straight.” His tone was light and sardonic. This tone had been a well-known and well-liked quality, I knew, of his writing. “I had nothing to do with any of it. Mort Feather did all the work. He created the characters, he designed them, he invented their histories and their powers and came up with all those villains they fought. I never did anything but tinker with the words before they went into the little balloons.” He smiled a lipless smile. “Yep, it was all Mort.”

The interviewer, solemn-faced, hush-voiced, now offered Artie a chance to abase himself. Artie took it. He said that it felt very good, finally, to get all this off his chest. While he talked, I watched the live Artie Conn. He slouched in his chair, hands pressed together on either side of his nose, watching himself. His eyes were alight with a strong emotion of some sort, but I could not determine which. Pride would have been my guess; pride, flickering. Then the segment ended and dissolved, in a foam of pixels, into a carrier battle group on the Leyte Gulf. Mr. Conn got up and stopped the tape.

“That’s it,” he said. He rewound the tape, returned it to its sleeve, and handed it to me. He was watching my face, looking for my reaction to his feat of self-betrayal.

“Is it true?” I said, after a moment.

“You don’t believe it?” There was a plaintive note of gratitude in his voice. “You think I was just making that up?”

I thought for a moment, then nodded. He let out a long, slow breath, and sat back down.

“My wife believed it,” he said. “She wouldn’t speak to me for two days after the show. Finally, I had to tell her that it was just a load of bull I made up to try to get through to Morty.”

“You shouldn’t have done it,” I said. “It wasn’t worth it. It isn’t what he wants.”

“What does he want?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Conn. He claims that you do. But I don’t get the impression—I have to tell you—I don’t think it has very much to do with who came up with the Elf or the Aztec Knight.”

“We met for the first time in 1936, at Henry Ward Beecher Junior High, in Brooklyn.”

“And you’re telling me—I’m not questioning what you’re saying, I’m just trying to get clear about this—that you and Mr. Feather have known each other for more than sixty years, and in all that time there was never any incident? You never, I don’t know, took his girl away, or . . .” I tried to imagine other possible hurtful scenarios, but all my ideas were the stuff of bad movies starring Joan Crawford. I finished, lamely, “Or something of that nature?”

“Rabbi, what kind of person do you think I am?”

“I think you are a good person, Mr. Conn. But there has to be something.”

“No. No, I always treated him fair. I looked out for him. Hell, I used to find girls for him.” He gave his head an emphatic, old-man shake. “No. I’m going to make him tell me. I’m not going to fool around anymore. If I’ve been barking up the wrong tree all this time, he owes it to me to just come out and tell me what it is that I supposedly did.”

He sprang to his feet and made his way as quickly as his unsteady legs could carry him toward Suite 105. As we passed my office, we ran into a grave, well-dressed couple: the Weintraubs. Mrs. Weintraub looked at me with evident longing. I hated having to ask them to wait. “I’ll be right back,” I promised, feeling my cheeks hum, and, although they were very gracious, they looked a little surprised to see me go. Why was I indulging Conn’s mania in this way when I had work to do? I offered him my arm once again, but this time he shook his head. When he reached Mr. Feather’s door, he stopped, his right hand curled into a fist, poised to knock. But then he lowered his hand.

Betty Firestone emerged from her apartment, carrying a carton of Newport cigarettes and a six-pack of diet cream soda.

“They took the poor man away to die in the hospital,” she said with brutal tenderness. “You just missed him.”

On my way to the funeral home, I drove Artie Conn to the hospital and waited with him until the nurse would allow us into the room, but Mort Feather never regained consciousness, then or on any of the three subsequent times that Mr. Conn drove up from San Diego. At the funeral, Artie Conn was one of five aging giants of the comics business who carried the coffin from the hearse to the grave, the remaining sixth of the burden being taken up, to his everlasting wonder, by David Teplitz, Ph.D. The service was the best attended that I was ever to hold at Zion Pointe—more than three hundred comic-book fans and professionals, from all over the world, turned up to mourn the loss along with the overgrown, serious boy I had chosen to marry, that sober, reticent nebbish whose mind contained the residuum of positronic nebulae and atom-powered gods.

To his nephew, Jerry, from White Plains, who did not even bother to come to the funeral, Mort Feather left everything he owned, and all his modest wealth, as well as all future proceeds, if any, from the sale of his paintings. That, at least, was the impression I got from a brief conversation with Mr. Feather’s attorney a few weeks after he died. Then, one afternoon about six months after the funeral, Betty Firestone stopped by my office. She was carrying a flat white cardboard box whose lid was printed, in gilt letters, with the name of the old Wanamaker’s department store. At one time it might have held a sweater or a shawl.

“Do you happen to have a telephone number, Rabbi, for that partner of Mort Feather’s? The one that was on television and they put too much foundation. Cohen, or is it—?”

“Conn,” I said, reaching for my purse. “Yes, I think I have his card somewhere. Why?”

She hefted the box, looking irritated with me, as if I ought to know perfectly well why she was here and what this was all about.

“This is supposed to be for him,” she said. “Mr. Feather gave it to me a day or two before they took him away. For safekeeping. The end was coming, and he knew it. ‘Betty,’ I remember he told me, ‘this is probably it.’ He wanted the other one to have this. But I don’t know what happened. Somehow I lost track of it. I was cleaning out my desk this morning. Here, take it. Take it, Rabbi.”

I felt a tingle in my hands, as though I were about to touch something profound and sad. “So what’s in it?”

Mrs. Firestone looked offended.

“That’s none of my business,” she said.

I took the box, thanked her, and gave Mr. Conn a call. He sounded very surprised to hear that Feather had left him something.

It was a lovely, crude relic, a hundred photostatted pages stapled together between pink paper covers. The title was hand-lettered with Art Deco flair, and under it there was a drawing of a man in a bubble helmet stepping out of a finned rocket called “The Conestoga of the Stars.” A bunch of little Martians were standing around looking astonished. The drawing was signed “Feather ’36”; I wondered how much some collector would pay for that bit of early work. I opened the yearbook and riffled quickly through it. The pages gave off a nostalgic whiff of rot and outmoded typography. The children whose photographs filled the back pages looked like miniature adults, serious people with mortgages and obligations, dressed in neckties and sombre sweaters.

“The Pioneer,” he said. “Christ, I haven’t seen one of those in years.”

“Does it—well, does it mean anything to you?”

“No, not right off the bat. But I’ll give it some thought on my way.”

“I could mail it to you. You don’t have to—”

“I’ll be there in three hours,” he said. “If he left me something, I want it.”

He showed up late that afternoon, drenched in sweat, his hair standing up in all directions, and looking, really, half mad. “I had the top down,” he said, sounding breathless. “But I guess I forgot my hat.” I pictured this eighty-year-old man shooting up the 405 in his Italian ragtop and big black ophthalmological sunglasses, the brains boiling in his head. I steered him toward my office and fetched him a cup of water. He drank it gratefully, and then polished off two more. For a minute he just sat with the yearbook in his lap, his stomach gurgling, cooling down. Then he began to flip slowly through the pages, lingering over certain photographs, from time to time offering a reminiscence.

As he turned the last few pages, something slipped from the book and floated, tumbling like a maple propeller, to the ground. I stooped to pick it up. It was a blank scrap torn from a sheet of paper that had itself been torn from a Zion Pointe memo pad.

“ ‘Camera Shy,’ ” Mr. Conn said, studying the page that had been marked by the notepaper.

“What’s that?”

He turned the yearbook around and held it up for me to see. At the bottom of the last page of photographs of the graduating class of ’36, under the rubric “CAMERA SHY,” two entries were stranded. Though the typeface was small, I could easily make out the pair of names. “That was the day,” he said, his voice breaking a little in wonder as the memory bobbed abruptly to the surface of his mind. “Yeah. That’s right. He’s right.”

“Mr. Feather? What day? What is he right about?”

“That was the day we met. In the library. They were taking yearbook pictures that day, during lunch.”

“And you were hiding from the photographer?”

“What can I tell you?” He sat, shivering from the memory or the sweat evaporating on his brow. “I was camera shy, like it says in the book. If you’d seen me then, you’d understand why. And Morty never liked to have his picture taken. He used to hate it when I made him draw himself into the comics.” His tone lightened, as he settled in to telling me the story. “See, I used to go in the library and eat my lunch sometimes, you know, I wasn’t the happiest kid. God knows. My kid sister had died. My parents—don’t get me started on them. So anyway, that day in the library, I’m hiding out with my copy of Astounding Stories, and I see this tough boy, Morty Feather, the kind of kid I would normally go out of my way to avoid running into, and he’s in there eating his lunch, and also reading that month’s issue of Astounding Stories, which, I can remember to this day, had the conclusion of that H. P. Lovecraft story, the one in the South Pole. Turns out Morty Feather likes E. E. (Doc) Smith, too. Also Edmund Hamilton. Turns out he wants to be an artist. We sit there talking for an hour. Right before the bell rings, I ask him, ‘So, first time they find life on another planet. Humanoid or totally alien? What’s your bet?’ And he goes”—he lowered his voice and scrunched up his features until they fairly approximated Mr. Feather’s pugnacious mien—“ ‘Depends.’ ‘On what?’ ” He laid on the Brooklyn, thick as mustard. “ ‘On whether the planet was one of the seed worlds of the galactic parent race or if it, y’know, just evolved by chance.’ My family moved to the Bronx a couple weeks later, and I never saw him again after that until one day in 1946 when totally by chance the editor at Nova put us together. That was how we got our start.”

“What else does it say there, under your names?”

He handed me the book, and I read the brief texts accompanying each of their imageless entries:

ARTHUR CONN

(“Artie”)

Chess (1) Galileo Club (3,4) Accordion Club (4)

We firmly expect, some fine day, very soon,

To bump into Arthur Conn on the Moon

For Morton (“Morty”) Feather there were no activities or interests listed. There was merely an enigmatic couplet:

Get into a scrap and ol’ Mort is your guy

But what is the source of that gleam in his eye?

That was it; there was no other trace of them anywhere in the book. I checked the photographs of the Galileo and Accordion Clubs, but young Artie Conn seemed to have managed to miss out on those photo sessions, too.

“I guess Morty just wanted me to have this,” he said, sounding a little disappointed now that the initial exhilaration of recovering the long-sunken memory had subsided. “Couldn’t think of anyone else who might appreciate it. Why he held on to it all this time I don’t know. God knows, I threw mine away years ago.”

“It must have meant something to him,” I said. “That day in the library.”

“Yeah. It meant something to me, too, you know. I never forgot it. When Sol Geisler reintroduced us that day in his office, back in ’46, I recognized Morty right away.”

“Well, perhaps it meant more to him than to you,” I suggested. “He was a pretty lonely man, you know. He never really had anyone but you.” I thought of the story that David had told me, of how Feather’s brilliant art work had seemed to languish from the day that Conn betrayed him. Perhaps what had snuffed out the flame of Mort Feather’s wild and minor genius was not the fact that Conn had sold out their partnership, and their possible legal claim to a considerable fortune, but that, with a stroke of his pen, he had wiped out the history of a blessing, refuted—to make a balloon payment—the lone, certifiable miracle of Morty Feather’s life: his friendship with Artie Conn. “Maybe that’s what made him so angry.”

Mr. Conn considered this for a moment, and for the first time I thought I saw in his wan blue eyes the radiant damage of grief. He picked up the Dixie cup and tipped it toward his lips, but he had already drunk all the water. He sighed, crumpled the cup in a fist, and nodded.

“You know what?” he said. “That wouldn’t surprise me a bit. He always took everything so goddam seriously.” He stood up, with the yearbook tucked under his arm. “Oh, well,” he said, giving it a pat. He shook his head, smiling a little, as if mocking himself for still caring so much about Mort Feather’s forgiveness when there was no longer any mortal chance of getting it. “I have to admit, Rabbi, I was hoping there might be a clue here.”

I didn’t know what to say, how to explain to him that this—our everlasting human cluelessness—was his unforgivable sin. I went around my desk, and hugged him goodbye. As he walked, limping, out of my office and my life—a month later he had a stroke and died, on his knees, beside his bed, while feeling around for a lost slipper—I said a prayer for him. I prayed that one day, here or in another place, Mr. Conn would find the forgiveness that he sought from the shade of the boy he had once chatted with, for an hour, about life on other worlds, on what had been, though he was blind to it, the happiest day of his life. ♦

“I didn’t know which was worse—the idea of my father’s remarrying for love or of his actively seeking out a stranger for companionship.”

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.